The Complete Persepolis Identity Essay

The Complete Persepolis is a very interesting book describing the struggle of a young woman trying to find herself and her identity, in a time of oppression and religious enforcement. Parts of her identity come from different aspects of her life. She was born a woman girl, she who thinks of herself as modern but she has her own beliefs, separate from that of her family’s and that of her country of origin. Essentially she has her own identity and this memoir, that she wrote, is her path to discovering that identity. Marjane Satrapi’s identity is shown through several motifs in the book. The way she dresses, the way she talks and the way she thinks, to name a few. But, as you’d expect from a coming-of-age story (if one can call it that), these things change throughout the story. Her childhood, adolescence and adulthood each have changes that take place gradually but clearly. You can see these throughout certain images in the book. There’s the image of a punk drawing that she put on her wall as a child, there’s the images of her in Vienna as she grows and changes and finally there’s the image of her when she goes back home and she sees the punk drawing on her wall.

She was smart and she held her own. Her parents knew that she would never be able to express herself fully, or find herself wholly in Iran and thus, sent her away to Vienna, there she was able to determine what she believed in (if anything) and what she was going to stand for as well as figure out how she defined herself. This is really important because without her own self-definition she would’ve just blindly followed her old friends into whatever they were doing whereas she stuck to doing what she felt was, not only right, but fun as well. She found herself through her hardship and homelessness. She found that she needed this in order to be where she is today and Satrapi portrayed this through her